in a letter from Hawai‘i, edited and rewritten in New England, printed in American newspapers, and read in England, brought the British, American, and Hawaiian legal worlds into collision.
On this day in 1827, a group of American Congregationalist missionaries was summoned from their new settlements across the archipelago by the ali‘i (chiefs) to appear before them on O‘ahu. In this ‘aha ‘ōlelo, spoken words carried the force of law. And words were the central issue in this dispute. While the British men chose to focus on the parts of Richards’ letter that told of Leoiki’s sale, for Richards, what was far more important about the letter and other reports like it from the mission were their detailed accounts of the “outrages” or attacks on mission stations by British sailors and whalers over a kapu (chiefly legal pronouncement) that prohibited Hawaiian women from traveling to ships. Serving as his own defense, Rev. Richards gave a verbal performance illustrating his already ripe capacity for political expression in the Hawaiian language, though he had lived in the islands a mere four years: “It is for you to deliver us over to such hands as you see proper, for you are our chiefs. We have left our own country and can not now receive the protection of its laws.… If I am a bad man or have broken the laws of your country, it is for you to try, and acquit or condemn me—you alone are my judges—it is for you to send me from your shores, or protect me here. With you is my life, and with you is my death. The whole is with you.”1
Richards’ speech is striking because of the forcefulness with which it recognizes Hawaiian structures of legal authority, although “laws,” “acquit,” and “condemn” were concepts that Richards imported from other legal traditions. Richards begins by recognizing the political authority of the ali‘i, repeatedly stating that the American missionaries stationed in the island were now subjects of the ali‘i—“for you are our chiefs.” He then emphasizes the distance of New England and its laws from Hawai‘i. He asserts that his behavior and words should be judged by Hawaiian law, posing it thus: if I have broken the laws of your country, “you alone are my judges.” British and American laws had no primacy in this matter, for Hawaiian chiefly authority was the only rule of law in the islands.
Richards made clear to the ‘aha ‘ōlelo and any outside observers that he considered himself subject to the rule of the chiefs, but a more important aspect of his verbal performance gives us insight into how persuasive Richards might have appeared, and how his precise choice of words may have moved the ali‘i. Although Richards wrote about these proceedings in English, his speech cannot be understood or interpreted only in English. A correct apprehension of Richards’ words as a performance within a chiefly parliament requires that one also have an ear for the kinds of Hawaiian phrases and terms that were native to Hawaiian law and politics before the arrival of foreigners in the islands and into the nineteenth century. With such an ear, we can hear a phrase that clamors for chiefly attention: “It is for you to send me from your shores, or protect me here. With you is my life, and with you is my death. The whole is with you.”
With these words, Richards revealed an aptitude for understanding Hawaiian political discourse that had thus far not been widely evinced among his missionary counterparts.2 The Hawaiian phrase I ka ‘ōlelo nō ke ola, i ka ‘ōlelo nō ka make (In speech there is life, in speech there is death) may appear to indicate Richards’ abject submission to the chiefs. But instead, his repurposing of the phrase and its cadence demonstrated his cultural intelligence, as he played a rhetorical game of power in Hawaiian. The Hawaiian phrase is a precept descriptive of the authority of chiefly speech, which could determine the life or death of a person according to the degree to which a kapu had been flouted.3 By taking this Hawaiian precept and turning it slightly to point toward his own life, Richards attempted a moment of Hawaiian political theater. He chose the perfect moment to invoke the mana (power) inherent in chiefly speech.4 And he deftly reminded the ali‘i that it was their responsibility as pronouncers of kapu to judge the words he wrote about Leoiki in relationship to precedent, to past chiefly judgments of similar behavior.
Richards’ rhetorical and political performance at the ‘aha ‘ōlelo of late 1827 pushes us to rethink many aspects of writing a history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Hawaiian law and governance. First, his condition at that moment—when a British consul and sea captain demanded that he, an American, face British justice for writing about an incident that happened in the Hawaiian Islands—foregrounds the fact that early nineteenth-century Hawai‘i was not a colony of either America or Britain. Second, that an ‘aha ‘ōlelo was called to deliberate what to do with Richards in the face of British demands reminds us that Hawaiian governance and legal practices were strong and viable; the ali‘i were asked to deliberate about how to deal with foreigners in the islands. And finally, the rhetorical skill with which Richards asserted Hawaiian rule and jurisdiction over his body and conduct not only gives us insight into an important evolution in Hawaiian governance (is he a foreign or domestic subject?). In Richards’ speech, we can also observe how languages and epistemes might engage one another deeply. When systems of meaning-making intersect, we see not a “missionary perspective” or a “native perspective.” Instead, we find a coalescence of different worlds of words, expanding their reach and salience. And Richards offers us a window into what one must be able to hear, to know, and to interpret to be a successful teller of how meanings and histories are made at the confluence of languages and cultures.
This book is about Hawaiian governance and law at the moment of this coalescence, about the forces both internal and external that contributed to this coalescence, and about how we correct the imbalance in the historiography of Hawai‘i by revealing what colonial histories of Hawai‘i have left out: a story of continuing and evolving Hawaiian governance and law conducted in the Hawaiian language.
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Readers of past historical narratives of Hawai‘i may feel kama‘āina (familiar, at ease) with a history that starts in 1778 and ends in 1898. In these accounts, Hawaiian historical time begins with Captain Cook’s “discovery” of the Hawaiian Islands, the remotest place in the vast northern Pacific Ocean. Many histories relate that Hawaiians lived isolated and unknowing of the greater world outside their islands, amazed at the foreigners with large ships they called floating islands. Cook’s deification was inevitable, yet the natives killed him when he did not live up to that status—or so the story goes. After this initial contact with the British, the islands were laid open to visitors from across the globe. A young chief from the island of Hawai‘i named Kamehameha used foreign advisers and weapons to aid in his quest to conquer all the archipelago’s islands. His wars succeeded in consolidating a unified kingdom. But tragically, mere months after his death in 1819, his two closest wives and his heir, Liholiho, struck down an entire system of laws and regulations called the ‘ai kapu, ordering temples destroyed and images burned. This historical narrative leads us to a conclusion: the old religion is cast down, and in its wake is left a vacuum—no law, no religion—that begged to be filled by civilization.
This narrative continues. Serendipitously, mere months after this cataclysmic break with the past, a new kind of haole arrived in the islands. American missionaries from southern New England brought Christianity and implements for planting a new civilization. They brought the Bible, printing presses, and the religious traditions and teachings of their God. Upon landing, these missionaries viewed Hawaiian governance structures in terms of the feudal lordships and social relations that their own Old World English ancestors had escaped.
The story usually told of the 1820s in Hawai‘i begins with this missionary settlement as the primary stimulus of a decade of radical transformations in Hawaiian life, especially in governance and law. Now-cemented relationships between Boston merchants and certain Hawaiian ali‘i produced the first large-scale harvest and export of ‘iliahi (sandalwood). This sandalwood trade with China, according to the narrative, fed avaricious chiefs who tyrannically exploited their maka‘āinana (non-ali‘i) subjects. As the maka‘āinana were forced to go to the mountains to harvest a tree for outsiders, they had to leave their
